Interesting reaction to Esperanto vocabulary, which has no Portuguese roots at all except to the extent that there are many Romance-language roots in Esperanto, which were borrowed mainly from French or Latin forms.
A large number of constructed languages including Interlingua were simplified Latin/Romance languages designed for immediate passive readability by educated Europeans who already knew some European languages (even speakers of English and German know lots of Romance vocabulary). These Latinate languages however are not easy to master for active use (speaking and writing) due to irregularities and the requirement of a large vocabulary to be expressive. Esperanto is unusual in making it possible to be very expressive even with a rather small vocabulary, thanks to its non-European mechanism for creating new words out of invariant particles which are themselves words. It's rather like making molecules out of invariant atoms, and it contributes to creative linguistic playfulness. Bruce On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote: > I appreciate your post Rich and owen and Bruce's responses. > > 3) Of the several auxiliary languages, I find Interlingua the easiest to > read/understand without any particular training... Esperanto seems to rely > heavily on Portuguese vocabulary/roots which are just (un)familiar enough > for me to find it difficult. In every case, I am not fluent enough to feel > I am able to *think* in these as alternate languages while I do sometimes > think in Spanish, in Mathematics, and in several computer languages (for > very narrow thinking unfortunately). I wish I could think/percieve in > musical structures or holographically, both of which I have a formal > understanding of but only limited intuition. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
